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11-03-10 // NEW ISSUE MONU #12 - REAL URBANISM





(browse the entire issue #12 on YouTube)

Luxury Space By Jason Lee; The World According to Mr. Reds By Doreen Jakob; The Shelter Category By Mammoth (Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes); How the City of Broad Shoulders Bought its Growth Spurt By Karl Johann Hakken; Residential Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust By Maximilian Mendel; Pyongyang in a New Era By Yim Dongwoo; Casino City State By Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran; Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut By Carol Moukheiber; Real High - The Desire for the Real in Urban Real Estate By McLain Clutter; Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture By Randall Teal; Life without Architects - Interview with Magriet Smit By Bernd Upmeyer; The New York Value Exchange By Joyce Hwang; Real Big - Interview with Bjarke Ingels By Beatriz Ramo; Magic Realism - A New Skyline for Rome By Simone De Iacobis; Business Park De Hoef Revisited 1998-2008 By Arjan Harbers (Topotronic); Brand New Landlords By Daan Roggeveen and Michiel Hulshof; Living on the Edge By Bas Princen; Why should a Developer read Aristotle By Marta Relats; Unbuilt Rotterdam By ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]; Rotterdam is a Whore - Interview with Andre Kempe By Beatriz Ramo and Bernd Upmeyer; To Build or not to Build By MVRDV

Just like the "Ideal Woman" on the cover of this issue on Real Urbanism - a sculpture by the Brooklyn based artist Tony Matelli - most of our cities are shaped by a particular set of values that does not necessarily lead to high quality urban spaces, but instead to scary, ethically unacceptable and distorted forms. As the "Ideal Woman", so "Ideal Cities" can easily end up only fulfilling the wishes and dreams of a powerful minority, but neglect the needs of most of the other people. Jason Lee, one of the contributors to this issue, that deals more with "Real Estate" Urbanism rather than with Actual or Factual Urbanism, uses this sculpture in his article "Luxury Space" to display the consequences that can occur when a financially powerful elite develops real estate projects in the city of Shanghai merely to accommodate their consumerist desires. Cities have been reduced to machines for making and spending money as Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes put it in their piece "The Shelter Category". Especially in Central European countries, where two decades ago the state-controlled economy changed into a market-economy, developers are driven by pure profit rather than by a genuine desire or even awareness of sustainable neighbourhoods and city development as Maximilian Mendel describes in his text "Residential Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust". But blaming only the financial elites and the real estate industry for the prevailing urbanism of mediocrity would be too easy. For successful urban planning, cities depend on private financing as Carol Moukheiber points out in her contribution "Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut", where a productive collaboration between a corporate and a cooperative party led - although heavily criticised and carried out in a kind of pseudo democratic Berlusconian way - to prosperous results. In the case of Rotterdam, where the municipality actually cares very little about the city, real estate developers seem to be even more concerned about the quality of urban spaces than the city itself, as stated by Andre Kempe in an interview with us entitled "Rotterdam is a Whore". To halt the process by which the built-up form of our cities continues to be mainly driven by practical concerns such as efficiency, profit, and self-promotion, Randall Teal proposes in his piece "Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture" that architects should become developers themselves. But how many architects would be able and interested in doing that? Magriet Smit, a Rotterdam based real estate developer, explains in the interview "Life without Architects" that she actually tries more and more to avoid working with planners and rather collaborates directly with construction companies as they share a greater understanding of their profession. But to prevent our cities from turning into monstrous "Ideal Cities", as perverted as the "Ideal Woman", all the parties involved that are shaping the cities - the developers, the municipalities and the planners - have to accept their interdependencies, and have to try to understand the different interests of each party and have to dare to navigate into unknown territory as Bjarke Ingels concludes in an interview with us entitled "Real Big".

(Editorial by Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, February 2010)


25-08-09 // MONU #11 - CLEAN URBANISM



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Sci-fi Greenery ...or just Responsibility? By Samo Pedersen; Clean Cities - Dirty People By Matteo Muggianu; Dirty Consumerism By Nikonus Pappas; Coming Clean By Randall Teal ; Domes over Manhattan - Interview with Gerd Hauser By Bernd Upmeyer; Rendering the Clean By Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI); The Mobile Library Unit By John Southern; Where the Grass Is Greener By Tomorrow’sThoughtsToday; Clean around the Edges By Lee Altman; Bio - Port By Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski; Zeekracht - The North Sea Masterplan By OMA; Scarcity: Bipolar Urbanism in the Sonoran Desert By Felipe Correa; Regenerative Ecologies By Claudio Astudillo Barra; Clean Energy is Dirty Business By Aleksander Tokarz; Dystopic Verdure By Jacob Ross Boswell; How to Win Poetic Praise and Influence Architects By Amanda Webb; The Cooperative City By Rogier van den Berg; Mania By Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Design Center

Do we simply have to stop having sex to produce Clean Urbanism - i.e. an urbanism that is dedicated to minimizing both the required inputs of energy, water, and food for a city as well as its waste output of heat, air pollution as CO2, methan, and water pollution, Samo Pedersen asks in his piece “Sci-fi greenery..or just Responsibility?”. In fact Randall Teal sees the growing world population frequently ignored in discussions on sustainability, as he points out in his article “Coming Clean: Owning Up to the Real Demands of a Sustainable Existence”. Fewer people spend less energy, and as the gas and oil supply will come to an end sooner or later, saving energy may be a cheaper and smarter solution for cities than depending on renewable energies, as Gerd Hauser, one of the leading researcers on the implementation of the EU Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, explains in an interview with us, entitled “Domes over Manhatten”. Although sustainability has recently become a cache misère for our lack of intent, a trendy make-up hiding our incompetence, with Clean Urbanism being its apotheosis as Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI) maintain in their contribution “Rendering the Clean”, energy self-sufficient cities are technically possible as Gerd Hauser states and explains using a five-point manifesto. Greg Keeffe and Simon Swietochowski support that view by introducing their “Bio-Port” project, a vision of a “Free Energy City” set in Liverpool, where the old dockyards have been transformed into bio-productive algae farms. Furthermore, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) illustrates in its project “Zeekracht – The North Sea Masterplan” how wind farms could be clustered along an Energy Super-Ring in the North Sea, distributing national surpluses and supplying regional energy needs efficiently and profitably. On the other hand, Clean Urbanism cannot only be understood from a purely technocratic perspective, but also needs a social one as Claudio Astudillo Barra articulates in his article “Regenerative Ecologies – A Prototypical Approach to the Territory”, introducing Felix Guattari’s ideas of ecosophy. On such social aspects Rogier van den Berg focuses in his piece on “The Cooperative City”, where a community is created that triggers individual initiative and the cooperation of its users to generate collective values. The Cooperative City requires a flexible plan with an open end that is only guided by one set of rules, described by Bryan Norwood and the Jackson Community Center as “Mania: An Emergent Sustainability of Density and Intensity”, created by the disorganized, hyperactivity of an actualized system with no specified, singular goal, a bottom-up phenomenon that emerges from the individual events of architecture within the city, combined with the ideology of urbanism conceived as anti-capitalism and anti-homogenization. It is mania, and mania is clean.


06-02-09 // MONU #10 - HOLY URBANISM



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A Mormon Megaproject by Daniel Hadley; Then It Hit Me: Learn to Meditate by Brian A Shabaglian; The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces by Colin Davies; Cross Utilization: Enhanced Religious Experiences by NL Architects; Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an Urban Operating Procedure by Peter Dorsey; The Sensory Experience of Sacred Space: Senso-Ji and Meiji-Jungu, Tokyo by Raymond Lucas; Peace Through Superior Horsepower by Speedism; God is a Nigerian by Emeka Udemba; Emblematic Power - Interview with Kees Christiaanse; Sacred Wire by Elliott Malkin; The Mormon Church’s Infrastructure of Salvation by Jesse LeCavalier; Do not give up Hope! by Maurizio Scarciglia; [uhn-hoh-lee] Alliance: A Domain of Objects by Edward Richardson; Drive-Through Religion by Carolyn Sponza; Urban Rituals by Abha Mahajan; Sacred Beauties by Karen Crequer; Strucked by a Freak Wave by Matilde Cassani

Can the view on cities get any bigger than through religion? Probably not. But we believe that a magazine on urbanism such as MONU, that appears only twice a year, can never have a too open perspective. Although the picture in this issue is big, and the contributions are diverse and have different focuses, one thing can be found that runs through almost this entire issue on Holy Urbanism. It is the convinction that Holy Urbanism in the contemporary city does not appear, and is not created any longer, merely by religion itself, but rather by a crossbreed of religion and economy. How such Holy Urbanism can be produced is explained by Daniel Hadley, for example, through the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City that quite clearly defies the dichotomy between market and temple cities, in his article “A Mormon Megaproject”. Thus, the City Creek Center is designed to be a centre of consumerism and economic production, whose purpose, nevertheless, is to ensure vitality in front of the nearby Temple Square. Sacred and commercial spaces seem increasingly to coalesce and create a kind of Foucaultian Heterotopia, an environment that is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces and several sites that are in themselves incompatible, as Colin Davies points out in his contribution “The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces”. Peter Dorsey in his piece “Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an Urban Operating Procedure” argues that contemporary Holy Urbanism is flourishing especially at places where religion is creating a hybrid together with capitalism. As an example he mentions the Lakewood Church Central Campus in Houston, Texas that can seat more than 16.000 worshipers, adapting efficiently into a spectacle-based environment by satisfying multiple consumer appetites simultaneously. In the Nigerian city of Lagos the hybridisation processes of religion and the market have even transformed the urban space itself into a battlefield, in a free market where religion is a commodity to sell and an urban survival strategy, as Emeka Udemba concludes in his “God is a Nigerian”. Within such a capitalistic realm, religious buildings follow an increasingly territorial logic that is similar to capitalistic corporations or franchises such as McDonald’s or Starbucks. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, for example, standardized the design of their temples and thus created a generic network of identical buildings that are spread out - Starbucks-like - all over the planet, as Jesse LeCavalier illustrates in his article “The Mormon Church’s Infrastructure of Salvation”. Carolyn Sponza, in her contribution “Drive-Through-Religion”, even states that in the United States, planning a church and a shopping mall always begins with the same capitalistic question – how much parking the site can accommodate. Such an attitude leads in a lot of cases to the design of big box, Ikea-like, building types that are perfectly located along a suburban highway. But religious big boxes nevertheless - though convenient and visible - force visitors to seek them out, park their cars, and walk toward their front doors. And if you don’t think it’s for you, you can keep driving along the highway until the next big box containing another religion grabs your attention. Such Holy Urbanism promotes religious choice and makes multi-religious spaces possible that are flexible as pieces of fashion, as empty spaces for inter-religious dialogue that incarnate the belief in a multi-faith society and allow for openness, and heterogeneity as Karen Crequer reveals in her piece “Sacred Beauties”.


26-08-08 // MONU #9 - EXOTIC URBANISM



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A City under the Influence by Vesta Nele Zareh; Cities of Girl by Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix/ Map Office; Thawing Urbanisms in the Arctic by Mason White and Lola Sheppard; Living Facades - Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting by Owen Hatherley; Flying Grass Carpet by Joop de Boer; The 'Great Comeback' of The Chinese to Katendrecht by Els Vervloesem; Urbanism of the permanent Tourist by Deane Simpson; Plastic Wrapped History by Hannah Epstein; Golf Courses and Cultural Conventions of Nature by Jacqueline Schlossman; The Sky is not near enough by Shumon Basar; Defining the Exotic when Identity is Lost by Yasmine El Rashidi; Nondescript Exotism inside the Urban Tissue by Anne Seghers; Pseudo-Democracies and Pseudo-Commissions - Interview with Reinier de Graaf/ OMA by Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo; Elite Commune by Lei Liu; Re-fun by Yaowalak Baltisberger; Urbanism in a Minor Key by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza; The Exotic and the Local - From Superhero to Supercity by Yehuda

In this issue we have taken the deliberate risk of making ourselves look ridiculous by focusing its theme on "the exotic", which is often seen as some sort of worn out, utterly out of date topic, immediately evoking images of colonialism and imperialism. But what fascinated us right from the beginning, since this topic idea of exotic urbanism popped up in our minds, is - without any irony - the opportunity to shift the perception towards global urban phenomena, into a direction that does not necessarily focus on the question how cities more and more become the same through their global battle and competition to attract more urban assets, but how they can actually become more different despite an ever - expanding exchange and an increasingly accelerating process of interaction. On that question this issue of MONU provides a magnificent collection of exuberant essays and projects. There is something very paradoxical about the exotic in an urban context. When a city like Tehran, for example, started importing western planning models around 200 years ago, it tried to distinguish itself from conventional structures but also from other cities, as Vesta Nele Zareh has illustrated in her article "A City under the Influence". This could also be interpreted as an excursion into a brashly beautiful but savage and unforgiving territory as Owen Hatherley puts it in his piece about "Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting". Such exotic urban elements also seemed to deliver the possibility to escape from everyday surroundings and to experience the feeling of entering another world without leaving your actual urban realm as Deane Simpson describes it in his text on the "Urbanism of the permanent Tourist". But as soon as a certain critical mass of exotic urban elements has been implemented in a city and a certain amount of time has passed, exotic elements can no longer be distinguished from other elements, and especially not from the local elements. Shumon Basar describes such a phenomenon in his contribution "The Sky is not near enough" as a certain surreal salvation, where everything slides into some sort of grey state between both poles, a kind of pseudo-local or pseudo-exotic condition, something utterly unmemorable. Reinier de Graaf, one of the partners of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, clarifies this neither-white-nor-black-condition in the whole current political situation on the Eurasian continent in an interview with us entitled "Pseudo-Democracies and Pseudo-Commissions". The conditions of the cities of the 21st century can probably best be described with the term "pseudo" as a result of the end of a black and white thinking, which gives the stage to dualistic urban qualities. Cities become able, just as superheroes, to oscillate between two different entities, one earthly and mundane, the other heroic and exotic as part of their super-schedule as Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat investigates in his piece on "The Exotic and the Local - From the Superhero to the Supercity".


14-03-08 // MONU #8 - BORDER URBANISM



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SlaveCity - Interview with Joep van Lieshout by Bernd Upmeyer; Potential Nation States by STAR; Global Islands in North Korea by Simone Cartier and Katrin Gimmel; Operation Desert by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer; Kaliningrad by Ines Lüder, Dominique Hurth and Ciarán Walsh; Segregated Istanbul by Pelin Tan; Crisscrossing Lives by Horng-Chang Hsieh and Vittaya Ruangrit; A Fictional Dialogue between two Curators by Umi; Cross - Border Suburbias by Teddy Cruz; Reciprocal Developments by Arjan Harbers and Kristin Jensen; Tijuana - Vernacular by Federico Diaz de Leon Orraca; Border Models by Annemarie Strihan; Bohemian Cheapness - Interview with Jaroslav Kubera by Bernd Upmeyer; Sin City by Daan Roggeveen; On a Trip Down Memory Lane by Lukas Feireiss; Windsor: The American Sector by Justin A. Langlois; Westberlin - My Cold War Heroine by Vesta Nele Zareh

Although we never intended to be a utopian magazine, when we started out we were put into the same category as those small and short-lived radical periodicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s. As a matter of fact we were never interested in contemplating the fictional, yet perfect, socio-political urban conditions or the possibility of the ideal society, however unrealistic. To the contrary, we have always been fascinated by all the idiosyncrasies of reality, the conventional and the pragmatic as an inexhaustible source of innovation. Nevertheless, in this issue we provide some reflections on utopia. It appears to be the case that cities located close to nation-state borders in particular, may be described as isolated islands, where a different type of life seems possible, and as places conducive to experiments and utopia as Ines Lüder, Dominique Hurth, and Ciarán Walsh show in their article about the Russian enclave Kalingrad. Border cities are often privileged as they are in a position to determine their own rules. Joep van Lieshout created with his highly sinister utopian art project “SlaveCity” such an extreme case of self-rule, which he explains in an interview with us. Switching back to reality, it may be said that nation-state borders seem to have the most vigorous impact on cities when they appear in ‘doubles’ – i.e. one on each side of the border. Together they create a kind of symbiotic urban love and hate relationship, a living together of dissimilar organizations, which can lead to positive and negative “Reciprocal Developments” between both cities as explored by Arjan Harbers and Kristin Jensen in their case studies on Ceuta and Gibraltar. Teddy Cruz - in his article “Cross-Border Suburbias” – describes such relations between border cities as exposed landscapes of contradiction where conditions of difference and sameness collide and overlap. But the clash of different cultures and ideologies in two border cities of two different countries, which are located close to each other, can also evoke severe identity conflicts as is pointed out by Justin A. Langlois when he describes the suffering of the Canadian city Windsor under the influence of Americanization through its neighbor Detroit. The increase in such identity conflicts between border cities can even transform cities into urban ideological battlefields, where urban planning is utilized to gain political and cultural supremacy, as it is shown by Vesta Nele Zareh in her piece about the Architectural Cold War between West- and East Berlin.


10-09-07 // MONU #7 - 2ND RATE URBANISM



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Branding the Generic City by Alfredo Andia; Bern, Beverwijk, and the Representation of Cities by Joost Meuwissen; Claiming Space by Daan and Job Roggeveen; I like my Town by Medium; Music City, USA by Veronica Kavass; Banal Urbanism by Jamie Peck; 2nd Rate Urbanism in 1st Rate Urban Areas? by Doreen Jakob; I ROTterdam by Charles Bessard and Nanne de Ru; The Re-Creation of the European City by Beatriz Ramo/ STAR; Dumped in Almere - Interview with Floris Alkemade by Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo; Little New York by Melisa Vargas; Wholesale Urbanism by Michael Jenson; 3rd Rate Guide to Second Rate Urbanism by Alex Schafran; What is Antiurbanism? by Michael J. Thompson; Bonifacio Global City. Ideal Manila. by Ursula Faix/ bad architects group

In an increasingly connected world the economic realities are precarious for most 2nd rate cities. In the competition for jobs and an ever expanding tax base, 2nd rate cities are in a squeeze between the suburbs where land is even cheaper and even more accessible by car on the one side, and the real attractive 1st rate urban areas that draw the highly educated and the creative on the other side. And since planning ‘down’ to a suburb is not an option that is considered by most cities, the fight for the survival of 2nd rate cities is to attract more urban assets. Beatriz Ramo presents one such Urban Shopping List for European second-rate cities. According to the US-based urbanist Richard Florida the latest ‘must have’ for a city is a creative class. In the information economy attracting those who work in the creative sectors is the key to economic success and growth. However as Jamie Peck in his article “Banal Urbanism – Cities and the Creativity Fix” argues, this strategy is just another way in which cities compete for an inherently mobile resource – the creatives can at any time pack up and move to the next happening place. Plus the causal story is far from solid, the cities investing in their hip factor as a development strategy might well be chasing a chimera. But in the process they neglect those neighborhoods and people that truly would need support. The creativity fix as the business park of the new century. Second-rate cities are much more vulnerable to adversarial politics and ideologies that promote suburbanization instead of development of successful cities. Unlike cities of global format like New York or Tokyo, they cannot create enough of an independent urban dynamic that buffers them against anti-urban politics. Michael J. Thompson traces the long history of an ideology that feeds much of these politics. Antiurbanism – an ideology that demonizes urban life. For some concrete examples of how these anti-urban politics can be directly reflected in concrete practices look at Alex Schafran’s Unofficial Guide to 2nd Rate Urbanism.


30-01-07 // MONU #6 - BEAUTIFUL URBANISM



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Potentially Beautiful by Sean Burkholder; Beyond Kitsch by Dirk Hebel and Deane Simpson; Sterile Rotterdam by Melisa Vargas; The Anti-Urinator by Supersudaca; Beauty and the Sublime by Joost Meuwissen; The Revolving Transient by Lukas Reichel; Pedaling Hope by Jen Petersen; Microrayons by Bee Flowers; Advanced City Camouflage by Cruz Garcia; Stripped Bare by Nathalie Aguinaldo
The Terrifying Century of Beautiful Urbanism by Bert de Muynck; The Secrets behind the Making of a Beautiful City: Jakarta by Ilya Maharika; A short Encounter with a Chair by Katerina Pertselaki; Beautiful Urbanism by Pierre De Angelis; Great Unraveling by Ju-Hyun Kim and Bohyun Kim; The City Beautiful by Suzanne Loen; A Typology of Mess Punkt by Jeremy Beaudry; Big is Beautiful by Jarrik Ouburg

Even though the concept beauty remains elusive we think our issue is successful in shining some spotlights on the issue. One of the themes from the articles is that beauty in urbanism is what one could call an emergent quality. It rarely is in the object itself. It exists in the way we perceive spaces and objects, our vantage point. It is while wandering though the city, resolving contradictions, when we see things that jolt our imaginations that we experience beauty. It can be a small detail such as obscure dots on the sidewalk that German civil engineers place all over the city to measure which propel Jeremy Beaudry along daydreaming trajectories as he assembles the dotted pattern of Berlin. Movement plays a central part, be it by bicycle as Jen Petersen describes or in future cable cars that Lukas Reichelt invents. Or within 30 years high resolution and real time aerial photography will open yet another facade of the city to our perception – the view of the roofs as Ju-Hyun Kim and Bohyun Kim predict. But if it is not all just in our minds then there are some important tools for those who do care about who and what it is that is built and declared beautiful – or left for us to find the beauty in. How much leverage do we really have to imagine or stamp that which is beautiful – if we must resolve ourselves between a complete rejection of the sorts of beauty that seems to have many followers – Disney architecture for example – to a naïve embracing of 30m high cowboy boots? Can we go truly Beyond Kitsch as Dirk Hebel and Diane Simpson suggest? Does the striving for a generic sense of beauty bear even more serious repercussions as Ilya Maharika argues in his study of Jakarta?


10-07-06 // MONU #5 - BRUTAL URBANISM



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The Return of the Repressed by Loïc Wacquant; Vandalism as a Productive Force by Michael Zinganel; The Evil Architects Do by Eyal Weizman; Preventing Brutal Urbanism - Interview with the Director of the Security Task Force for the 2006 World Cup by Bernd Upmeyer; Terrorists Love Density by STAR; The Future of June 4th by Austin Arensberg; Repulsive Desperation in the Constructions of Survival by Baruch Bruce Gottlieb; Happy Slapping &ndash - Urban Violance in the Age of Camera Phones by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer; 5000 Years of Brutal Urbanism by UAS; It's the Protocol, Stupid by Marc Schuilenburg; On the Run - Contesting Urban Boundaries by Lukas Feireiss; Cities of Collision by Philipp Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets; (re)Moving History by John Comazzi; As a Child of the Suburbs: - a response to How Suburbs Destroy Democracy by Alex Schafran; A Rejoinder to Alex Schafran by Michael J. Thompson

Roughness, violence, brutality, seediness, ghettoization – all these are words that we associate much more readily with the city than with a suburb or the bucolic countryside. It seems even drug related crime develops a different character depending on whether it is in the city or the suburb. As the NYTimes reported in early July, identity theft is the crime of choice for meth addicts and both are flourishing in suburban regions of the US. In contrast crack cocaine or heroin dealers, are supported by heavily armed gangs usually set up in higher density urban zones. These high density areas are suited to ‘urban’ crimes like, prostitution, carjacking and robbery. So the suburban habitat seems perfectly suited for the sleepless meth-addict roaming through the internet, garbage cans and outdoor mailboxes in a quest to gather identities, while the density and proximity of a city is more fertile soil for the impulsiveness and raw brutally that is typical for crack and cocaine criminality. In a similar direction one of the directors of the World Cup 2006 security in our interview echoed some thoughts that also show the relationships between spatial configuration and the art of preventing urban brutality. These are just some of the topics that this issue of Monu presents: Media representation and context of brutality is one key aspect as our contributors show. Be it the possibility to easily record and distribute via cell-phone cameras as Peter Moertenboek and Helge Mooshammer describe in their article. Or the impossibility to censor images of resistance as Austin Arensberg describes. In our leading article Loic Wacquant analyzes the intensifying of structural brutality in the city: economic, social and political exclusion and the backlashes that inevitably follow. But brutality can also be an almost integral part of the history of development, in some cities as articles about places as different as Jerusalem and Seoul by Tim Rieniets and Baruch Gottlieb respectively show.


16-01-06 // MONU #4 - DENIED URBANISM



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Scrap and Build by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Jorge Almazán; Ex Gas Stations by UAS; Shopping for Vice by Jeffrey Ludlow; The Future of Filming in Downtown Los Angeles by Sarah Lorenzen; A Guide to Visiting Cities by Boris Sieverts; The Master of Lockhart (Texas) by Hans Frei; Transforming Local Government - privately by Robert H. Nelson; How Suburbs Destroy Democracy by Michael J. Thompson; Literature of the City 101 by William Alatriste; No Simple Problem Interview by Martin Schwegmann und Thorbjörn Reuter Christiansen with Mika Hannula; Infrascapes, Urban Androgyny and other unplanned Effects of Metropolitan Dynamics by Gabriel Duarte; No Slush by Tommi Mäkynen; E 70 by Beatriz Ramo/ STAR; Reinventing Lifta by Malkit Shoshan and Eitan Bronstein; Welcome to Houston, Texas by Eric Leshinsky; The Heckpfad by Kai Dolata and Lola Meyer; Volkspalast by Amelie Deuflhard and Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen; Hidden Veneration by Kristina Blazevski; DIY by Matthijs Bouw

From Tokyo to Lockhart Texas, from suburbs and informal settlements to the biggest representational buildings in capital cities, from Helsinki to Jerusalem, this issue offers a dazzling journey around the world to forms and episodes of urban life that have one thing in common: they lead a precarious existence, in our perceptions and in recognition of what is viable ‘urban’ life or - more drastically - are actually threatened in their existence. It is not only le Corbusiers famous “the eyes that cannot see” or don’t want to see, but sometimes also that which the eyes do not want to see (any longer). However as many of the contributions in this issue show clearly most of the time both of those symptoms of denying urbanism are happening simultaneously and are faces of the same coin. And the blindness and ignorance seems to be global and escapes narrow definitions of political ideology and even the categories of benevolent planners. Preservation of buildings and the neglect of destruction does not necessarily protect urban life – quite the opposite as Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Jorge Almazán suggest in their article about Tokyo. More dramatically, historic preservation or reconstruction can also be a strategy to rewrite the history of a place, as if to erase the traces of another population as is happening in Lifta - Israel. Size does not matter for the concept of denied urbanism – at least looking at the contributions. A small informal settlement on the fringes of the inner city of Cologne can be subject to the same mix of willful ignorance and the desire to create a clean city just as the Palast der Republik in Berlin – the biggest representational building of the former GDR. More often than not there are many sides from which one can see the denial. On the one hand Suburbia – the denying of urban life has profound negative consequences for democracy as Michael Thompson argues. On the other hand Michael Nelson sees potential in home owner associations as a particular form of governance that is massively emerging in suburban contexts and that is widely ignored at least among the mainstream planning community.


05-07-05 // MONU #3 - POLITICAL URBANISM



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Planning and Activism by Malkit Shoshan; nEUtral by bad-architects; Rojak by Maggie Peng; Between Aerial Defense and Modernism by Lola Meyer; Model City - Interview with Margitta Faßl, the managing director of 'Wohnungsgesellschaft Hoyerswerda' by Bernd Upmeyer; You shall be Urban by Theo Deutinger; Flevoland: From State Planning to Planning the Stateless by CASE; The Pharmacy by Joost Meuwissen; Turning the Corner by Fabian Faltin; Supersuburbia by UAS

Exploring the relationship between power, politics and cities, urban territories is like looking at the chicken and egg question. What grows out of what? In Hoyerswerda, a middle sized east-German city where we spoke to Margitta Fassl, the Managing Director of the largest housing authority (that manages about 60x% of the cities housing units), the situation seems clear. The city over the last 50 years has been a ball on the waves of larger economic and political developments. From a small town of about 7,000 people, Hoyerswerda was built up into a model city the socialist era with about 70,000 people, now to its status is being a model amongst the shrinking cities in Eastern Germany that wither in the new market economics. Like clockwork is house after house demolished. There remain approximately 40,000 residents and the city is expected to lose at least another 10,0000 in the coming years. Hoyerswerda came to tragic fame in the early 90's when a racist, xenophobic mob and dozens of neo-nazis repeatedly attacked immigrants and engaged in violent street fights with the police. Ultimately the discussion about the relation between urban form and urban development, to politics and power, has a large impact on the self-understanding of the professions that deal with these topics. Are we as architects, planners, social scientists etc. mere 'hostages', as Rem Koolhaas expressed it at one point, of larger economic and political contexts, or can planning, research and building actually be activism, a contribution to a struggle to change things? Malkit Shoshan in her truly extraordinary project in a village in Israel in a way answers this question. Her account of the project in "Planning and Activism" shows how research in urban planning combined with an effort to engage stakeholders and powerbrokers can actually be a powerful political act.


20-01-05 // MONU #2 - MIDDLE CLASS URBANISM



(browse the entire issue #2 on YouTube)

Dispersion by Johannes Fiedler; Density, Zoning, and Class in New York City by Beth Lieberman; Mc Mansions by William Alatriste; Urbanism for the Middle Class in historic City Centers by Fernando Vegas and Camilla Mileto; Middle Class Urbanism Interview - with Thomas Sieverts by Bernd Upmeyer ; IKEA: When Cathedrals were blue by Manuel Shvartzberg; Neu Karow: a new space between berlin's past and its border by Katherine Bourke and Gregor Harbusch; Landscape Urbanism by Detlev Ipsen and Holger Weichler; Circuitous by Leah Beeferman; Adi, Audi, Aldi by Theo Deutinger; Middle Class Emulations by Angie Waller; The New Middle Class by Robert Winkel; Middle Class Desires by UAS

For the last few decades the middle class has been the driving force behind urban innovation. More than any other, this urban group has both the financial resources and the sheer power of numbers to effectively transform desire into urban reality. Many of the most obvious components of our cities - Row houses, apartment buildings and sports facilities, to name but a few - are in large measure a function of the existence of a broad middle class. The middle class symbolizes modest urban values, values that seem hopelessly anti-utopian and run counter to the megalomaniac concepts of cities proposed by great architects like LeCorbusier or Hilbersheimer. But in reality the middle class is comprised of some of the boldest urban utopists ever, individuals who have been realizing their utopias for decades. Much less dogmatic and more successful than any imagined utopia, with their power, influence and sheer numbers the middle class has shaped the urban landscapes we inhabit today. And although the term middle class is very blurry it might be exactly the contradictory relation of middle class to cities that could lead to a definition of what is the middle-class. As Johannes Fiedler argues in his text "Dispersion", in the absence of scarcity of some sort (e.g. economic, security) or top-down regulations, the default choice for living seem to be dispersed, low density environments. Or as Thomas Sieverts in our interview put it: "people seek the fringes". It is almost a pioneer-like quality that parts of the middle class exhibit – the constant search for the new fringe, the new land. The relatively new phenomenon of exurbs is the US expression of that impulse. Places that are ever further removed from the population centers almost completely disconnected from any form of civic life. In Europe or Germany this strategy is not an option due to lack of available open space. Instead in Berlin, as documented in the article by Katherine Bourke and Gregor Harbusch, spaces in between old and new cities are the new frontier – the new fringe that the middle-class colonizes.


16-06-04 // MONU #1 - PAID URBANISM



(browse the entire issue #1 on YouTube)

Imagining the Subsidized Landscape by CUP; After Growth by CASE with Reinier de Graaf; Urban Distortion by Shireen A. Barday and Damon W. Root; Urban Money Beats Global Money by Hans-Henning von Winning; The Paid Urbanism Project by Thomas Soehl and Bernd Upmeyer; SpaMania by Kai Jonas; Is a Bathtub Still a Bathtub on Mars? by William Alatriste; Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Civic Center and the Modernist Urban Landscape by Emily Pugh

Our experience of urban life today exists as it does because we have a complex system of subsidies interacting with our urban geography. Taxes, once extracted from the market economy cycle back to the masses as paid urbanism. Used wisely or not, spread fairly or unfairly, this money is probably one of the strongest forces animating our urban conditions today. The places we live in today are in many ways shaped by government spending - Subsidized Landscapes. Since the ‘90s, big enthusiasm about total privatization has subsided. Nowadays, everybody realizes that there is a need to keep certain things in the hand of public administration. Redistribution of enormous revenue is a commonly accepted means of keeping civil democratic societies working. Government intervention, taxing and spending are the terms we use to describe this state. Caught in an enormous network of redistribution that pervades everything and everybody, the power and influence of these processes rarely makes itself visible; we are never fully aware. A Kafkaesque web of bureaucracies constantly recreates and resuscitates our urban landscapes. Drifting through cities with their thousands of invisible dependencies and relationships, no one person can exactly define what keeps everything alive. Everything seems to be vibrant, but somewhere down the line, there are crosscutting streams and flows of decisions and administration behind it. It has been paid for. The multitudinous products of paid urbanism are hard to identify or define, but lie hidden behind every stone of the city. The effects of paid urbanism on urban settings cannot be overemphasized - without paid urbanism, cities as we know them would not exist. This first issue shines a number of spotlights into the thicket of subsidies and paid urbanism. What do networks of subsidies look like in fields like housing and farming in the US and what are their consequences for cities? What are the aesthetic impacts and absurdities of paid urbanism in places as different as Chicago, Coney Island (NYC) and Thuringen (eastern Germany). We feature projects that rethink the networks of paid urbanism and essays that reflect on the interwoven history of subventions and urbanism.